Atheists vs Catholics

[Socrates]

(quoted from "choose")
[quote]Actually the Catholic Church has been involved in very wide scale murder during its existence. It is only more recently and thanks to secularism that the church has been pacified. That pacification is also due to a less fundamentalist attitude being adopted (as a result of secularism). The books still say some pretty murderous stuff such as Luke 19 – I did mention that they’ve not been revised right?[/quote]
More nonsensical, unverified claims. What have you been reading, [i]The Da Vinci Code[/i]? If you're going to accuse the Church of "very wide scale murder," you'd better have something reputable to back it up, which thus far you have not.
And I don't know what Bible you're using, but I sure didn't read anything encouraging murder in Luke 19! Luke 19 has 49 verses (a bit long to quote here, but you can look it up), and in this chapter, Christ calls and stays with Zacheus the tax-collector, tells the Parable of the Talents, and rides into Jerusalem on an ass, and weeps over Jerusalem. Nothing "murderous" in there; provide a chapter and verse quote, please.

[quote]Regardless of whether the Catholic Church still continues to murder by violence or not is irrelevant to my point, and thus so is your refutation. The point is that your faith is implicit in a great deal of death and suffering and your only excuse for the promotion of that death and suffering over a basic safety precaution is your totally baseless faith. Please try to explain to me the difference between you supporting the consequences of your faith against Muslims supporting the consequences of theirs? The simple difference that your church gave up murder a few years back has no bearing at all on the fact that your faith, like theirs, still results in the direct consequence of death and suffering.[/quote]
Blah, blah, blah. Your "point" is still nonsense. The Catholic Faith is not "implicit" in anybody's death. The Catholic Faith does not promote sexual promiscuity, sodomy, drug abuse, nor anything else which has led to the scourge of AIDS.
People following Catholic morality do not engage in such activities in the first place, and thus your "point" is a moot one. Catholics who observe the virtue of chastity almost never get STDs.
And to compare the Church's teachings against contraception with Islamic murderers is beyond absurd and slanderous.

[quote]No, what I’ve said is that opposition to the use of condoms is in direct contradiction to what ALL of the EVIDENCE says would actually be beneficial to the people and would directly result in a reduction in death and suffering. The assertion that your faith compliments human reason also bares no relation to demonstrable truth. A more accurate statement would be that your faith overrides human reason, which is exactly my point.[/quote]
ALL of the EVIDENCE says that chastity is the best way to prevent AIDS.
It is your hedonistic anti-faith that is contrary to reason, worshipping instead the lower appetites.

[quote]I have started a debate on how you justify opposition to condom use in aids ridden Africa and on how you justify that in the face of the evidence, the vast body of professional medical opinion and how you differentiate the consequences of your faith from the consequence of Islam which you so obviously detest, as do I. This seems quite specific to me. So I ask for reasons and you don’t have any whatsoever because your opinion is not based on reason, it is based only on your faith. As such you are incapable of providing an answer or disputing effectively the validity of my assertion that the Catholic stance against condom use is wrong.[/quote]
The Church is opposed to all acts which deliberltely separate the sexual act from its procreative and unitive purpose. While obviously, you do not agree with this, if you look at the statistics, you will see that problems such as STDs, abortion, divorce, etc. have increased dramatically since the so-called "sexual revolution." Pushing hedonism and "safe-sex" has really done nothing to reverse these problems.
And as I've said, families and communities in which Catholic sexual morality is actually practiced have much less of these problems than people who live according to secularist hedonism.

[quote]I would like to discuss everything in fact. I think a good place to start would be the recorded views of Tomas Aquinas’ or St Augustine’s on heretics for example and how their views are not just derived from their religious belief but actually taken literally from the bible. I would say that if you have dealt with these accusations in the past please deal with them again – educate me. Unfortunately my education in history and religion does not at this time allow me to have the slightest clue how you could have “dealt” with recorded historical truth, especially since some of that record was written by important Catholics and in their own words and it consists of some rather extreme attitudes. You might also want to take into account that you will also have to argue against the prejudice and propaganda of your very own bible.[/quote]
Perhaps start by giving an actual citation, rather than just rhetoric and accusations. (Preferably in its own thread.)

[quote]How is it baseless? How is rhetoric? I think you’ll find that aids and other STDs flourish where basic safety precautions are not taken seriously. The WHO and every other health body on the planet will back me up on that, as will absolutely all of their research and statistics. Perhaps that is why Japan is not overrun by aids and STDs, or are they all secretly Catholic? Simple fact for you – when condom use goes up, rates of infection go down but when condom use goes down rates of infection go up.

Your morality is based on your books, your books are based on absolutely nothing at all that you have any supporting evidence for and they make the most incredible claims. Frankly your opinion is intellectually vacuous and devoid of any rational thought.[/quote]
And where chastity and monagomy are practiced (in accord with Catholic moral teaching) rates are lower still. People who have promiscuous sex are obviously NOT following Catholic moral teaching, so to blame Catholic moral teaching for their plight is irrational.
I'm just seeing more empty name-calling and accusations here, rather than substance. Unless you can come up with something of substance, it's not worth my time to respond.



(continued - too many quotes for one post)
[quote]It is only sin according to your faith. Without demonstrating your reasons, which of course you cannot, you have no genuine reason to promote your morality. The use of condoms provides very significant benefit in reducing infection rates and thus reducing immense suffering and wide spread death, not to mention reducing the economically crippling costs of the disease on those developing nations. Your morality here is evil. Rather like the Catholic ideas of inequality for women and oppression of homosexuals. To you it is morality because you are content to accept blanket rules from an ancient compendium of baseless fables. Other people decide their morality based on reason.[/quote]
Yet more empty rhetoric and accusations. And, having rejected the very notion of a God, by what basis can you call Catholic morality "evil"? Sounds like "theistic" language to me. By what basis can an atheist call anything "good" or "evil"? It would seem to have to all boil down to personal opinion.

[quote]That would be true if the Catholic Church had just decided to stay out of the issue instead of become part of the problem. In many villages the only information these people receive about condom use is from the Catholic representatives the Catholic Church has sent there. People are being told “Condoms are evil”, “Using condoms is a mortal sin”. You are not excused here. Your church is part of the problem, a major contributor to it in fact, undermining the work done by other groups to promote safe sex as a method of curtailing viciously high and spiralling infection rates. Your church is working for death and if you don’t see the connection or would rather just say “they should follow Catholic morality” (which even plenty of Catholics in the rest of the world fail to follow) then you are guilty of exactly what I have said you are guilty of – placing unreasoned faith above actual evidence at the cost of human life and suffering on a massive scale.[/quote]
The Catholic Church promotes chastity. Chastity does not spread AIDS.
If following Catholic morality is responsible for widespread death by AIDS, then why aren't, say, conservative Catholic communities in the U.S. full of AIDS victims and death?

[quote]Actually I think that sex happens. You guys call it temptation. I call it pleasure. And as many of your own priests can testify sexual desire can be pretty strong. The fear inherent in the faith does not provide a reliable control when sexual desire is high. Sadly it provided the control earlier when anindividual otherwise would have “sinned” by equipping themselves with condoms and the intention to use them if they had the chance.

You are also totally overlooking instances such as someone’s partner being infected by a method that is non-sexual and entirely innocent of your ridiculous sin concept, such as an accident or a transfusion. But this really is beside the point because the facts are clear that encouraging condom use would have a dramatic affect in reducing infection rates, regardless of other behaviours.

Whilst the Catholic Church invests its resources in scaring Africans away from using condoms it is investing in causing the death and suffering of others in contradiction to every medical study, statistic and expert opinion on the planet based on absolutely no supporting evidence at all. You need to start to be more pragmatic than dogmatic.[/quote]
You're merely showing more of your ignorance and repeating rhetoric. People can have monogamous sex in marriage. Nothing wrong with that. And how rubbers will prevent getting AIDS from things like blood transfusions is beyond me. Yes, the sanitary conditions, etc., in many African countries are poor, and this contributes to the problem.
Maybe some of the energy spent promoting contraception should be put into improving medical facilities and sanitation in third-world countries.

[quote]Agreed absolutely, but it does rather make the point that the faith, as you have said about condoms, is not 100% reliable and thus neither is the morality it supports.

It proves the ineffectiveness of the faith as a sole solution for an epidemic.

Homosexuality and paedophilia are not one and the same. The catholic objection to homosexuality is not something I agree with and the Catholic Church has also failed to raise a single credible argument against homosexuality that does not rely solely on its undemonstrated doctrine.

I believe absolutely everything is natural. That something is natural does not make it beneficial to society or individuals as a behaviour to adopt. My objections to some behaviours and beliefs are entirely rational.

I read a lot and some of what I read is propaganda, often in support of Catholics or other faiths. But I do not equate all Catholic priests to paedophiles any more than I equate all theists to idiots. I strongly disagree with your faith, some of your morality and virtually all of your reasoning (or lack of), but I consider most of you to be average people. Average people are usually well intentioned and deserve to have their individuality, but not their beliefs, respected. Let’s not be too jovial about this though, at the same time I believe it should be made clear that whilst I do not consider theists to be idiots, I do consider theism to be idiotic.

By mentioning the priests I am simply pointing out that your faith, even if others adopted it, does not provide a reliable solution. This alone is reason to champion basic safety precautions in conjunction with the rest of your faith or at the very least to stop working against something which will save many lives.[/quote]
That stuff about the priests is nonsensical. Sexual abuse is not caused by Faith, but is sinful and evil. And I do not see how such behavior "proves morality false," as it is acting contrary to Catholic morality.

And homosexuality is very much a part of the problem. The vast majority of the abuse did not involve true pedophilia, but homosexuality. 80% of the priestly abuse cases involved post-pubescent boys. That is a form of homosexuality. Pedophilia involves attraction to and abuse of pre-pubescent children. It most commonly involves little girls, and most pedophiles have actually been married men.

Homosexuality is one of the biggest spreaders of AIDS in America and Europe, and if you really wished to stop the spread of AIDS, you would oppose this activity. It cannot create life, but only disease and death.

[quote]Before we drop Hitler I think it might be worth you checking out the following link:

[url="http://www.nobeliefs.com/HitlerSources.htm"]http://www.nobeliefs.com/HitlerSources.htm[/url][/quote]
Hitler was no Christian and has repeatedly denounced Christianity, despite some of his public rhetoric. I would not expect a site devoted to promting atheism to be objective and truthful. If you want to keep discussing this, start another Hitler thread, as that is off-topic. (And I noticed you have still failed to address Communist oppression of Christians. You obviously prefer to engage in name-calling and empty rhetoric to dealing with facts.)

Edited September 4, 2006 by Socrates

[Budge]

How many end up not believing in God, or Jesus Christ because of the wickedness of Rome and its affliates and the fact they think that Catholicism is Christianity?

[quote]
Actually the Catholic Church has been involved in very wide scale murder during its existence. It is only more recently and thanks to secularism that the church has been pacified. That pacification is also due to a less fundamentalist attitude being adopted (as a result of secularism). The books still say some pretty murderous stuff such as Luke 19 – I did mention that they’ve not been revised right?[/quote]

They arent dummies, they know the Inquisition really happened....

I beleive the whole world would be TRULY Christian by now...{not Catholic} if the Catholic Church had never existed.

Edited September 4, 2006 by Budge

[MIKolbe]

[quote name='Budge' post='1056232' date='Sep 3 2006, 06:16 PM']
I beleive the whole world would be TRULY Christian by now...{not Catholic} if the Catholic Church had never existed.
[/quote]

Budge will be here all week, remember..the 7:30 show is COMPLETELY different than the 9:30 show... 2 drink minimum... try the veal!... and be sure to tip your waitress....thank you and good night...

To quote Cow of Shame's wisdom-filled mantra
"I before E, except after C"


I mean, I've read the posts that respectfully state how intelligent you are.. but really? i mean R E A L L Y....
[quote name='Budge' post='1056232' date='Sep 3 2006, 06:16 PM']
I beleive the whole world would be TRULY Christian by now...{not Catholic} if the Catholic Church had never existed.
[/quote]
Really..

Sounds like you've drunk the Jim Jones Kool-Aide, and you're coming back for seconds....

[Mateo el Feo]

I don't know what to make of Budge's post. "Choose" believes that any form of faith is bad, so Socrates made a thread to argue against "Choose"'s position. It's almost as if Budge wants to take Choose's position, hoping to never side with a Cathoilc on any subject.

So, Budge, go ahead and argue why you think that Choose is right and no one should have faith.

PS--My personal opinion: Choose, verbs are a bad choice for a screen name. It's a lot of work to insure that we're not actually using the term "choose."

[batteddy]

The problem with the argument is that it assumes that we believe [i]a priori[/i] that murder is wrong. And then goes on to attack us with that...

One can say, "The Church prays to Mary. Praying to Mary is wrong. Therefore the Church is wrong."
But the problem is, we don't accept the second premise. We don't believe it's wrong.

Now, in the case of Murder, we DO believe it's wrong. But we believe it's wrong BECAUSE the Church teaches it's wrong. Not [i]a priori[/i]. So the argument proves itself wrong, because the only reason you can even try to use that argument...is because the Church DOES teach murder was wrong.

If the Church didn't believe murder was wrong, we wouldn't either, and so the argument would be ineffective. The only reason you can even make the argument is because we [i]do[/i] believe murder is wrong, and you know it. But that itself PROVES that the Church believes murder to be wrong, because if the Church didn't believe it was wrong, we wouldn't either (ie, we don't assume it [i]a priori[/i], as you seem to have us)

It's like saying "You worship the Eucharist. That's idolatry. Therefore, the Church is wrong." But that very argument PROVES that Catholics don't believe in idolatry. Because the whole argument is based around the assumption that Catholics are against idolatry. Because if the Eucharist was idolatry, and if we did it anyway...then we would obviously believe in idolatry, and would admit it, and wouldn't care if you said we did, if we believed it to not be bad. The only reason you're even attempting the accusation is because you admit that we consider idolatry bad. But that very admission defeats the argument itself.

You're arguing that Catholicism is idolatrous and murderous, yet appealing to our opposition to idolatry and murder! But the very fact that you know we are against idolatry and murder should be enough evidence for you that we are, in fact, against idolatry and murder! You're argument contains the assumption that you're argument is untrue!